Personal/Business Bookkeeping Programs

Posted on November 29th, 2008, by Meggin McIntosh, Ph.D.

Here’s a question that came in to me:

Do you have any recommendations for business and personal bookkeeping programs? I am thinking of recommending Quicken to a client but have not used it in years.

I wrote this response:

…and what I use is QuickBooksPro. It does seem to be almost the ‘standard’ now for small businesses.

The person who helped me get mine set up is Marie Gibson, a small business consultant and QuickBooksPro Certified Advisor. Here’s here website: http://marie-gibson.com/index.html

Then, I contacted Marie about this and here is her great response:

Quicken, QB SimpleStart and QuickBooks Pro are published by Intuit-Quicken tends to be for personal use and allows for tracking of an investment portfolio (nice feature). QuickBooks is the standard for business as it uses a business process method, business terminology, and reports such as Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet. Simple Start (QuickBooks) is a very basic electronic checking account that may be perfect for new business owners. With that said, your clients could begin using Quicken or SimpleStart and eventually import their data into QuickBooks (and yes, this is a relatively pain-free process).

The important thing is that they start tracking their income and expenses right away. It is difficult to go back and rebuild-so business owners pay their CPA’s to organize their records when they could do it themselves. Start simple and build your system as your business expands. Feel free to contact me directly with other questions you may have regarding the software choices.

Marie Gibson Management & Consulting, LLC.

Accounting Success-Simply!

www.marie-gibson.com

And the good news is, Marie is going to be doing a teleseminar with me in January…so stay tuned for more info on this!!